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31 August 2016

Oh, that Rebel XTi. This exposure, despite being set on Aperture Priority with no Exposure Compensation, was a full 1.65 stops underexposed. A real challenge.

San Francisco. The skyline from Twin Peaks.

We liked how the light was falling on the city, with big clouds floating quickly over it. Dappled. That's the ticket. The dappled cityscape.

We opened it in Camera Raw and increased the Exposure before cranking up the Contrast (+47), killing the Highlights (-34) and Shadows (-22) before ratcheting up the Clarity (+45). Pretty drastic moves.

We still didn't like the color much, so we tried it with a Black-and-White adjustment layer. The Red Filter with maximum contrast helped it a good bit.

But we thought some color would be informative, so we dropped the Opacity of the adjustment layer to about 10 percent.

We ended up with a slightly-toned black-and-white cityscape that we preferred over both the monochrome and the color versions.

And just to show you where we started, here's the camera's JPEG thumbnail in the Raw file:

Original Capture. Quite underexposed, perhaps to save the highlights.

Shocking, really. But good exercise. Both the hike and the mental gymnastics dealing with the Canon file.


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